Gramps is a free, open-source genealogy program for recording, organizing and researching family history. It runs on Linux, Windows and macOS and is released under the GNU General Public License. It is meant for hobbyists as well as professional genealogists, and its interface is translated into dozens of languages.
How a family tree is structured
In Gramps, each kind of information is a separate record type with its own view: people, families, events, places, sources, citations, repositories, media and notes. Records link to each other, so one place record can serve every event that happened there.
Events carry roles. A marriage can link the bride, groom, witnesses and officiator, each with the part they played, rather than recording the marriage only on the couple. Places can be nested inside larger places, such as a parish within a county. Each link can carry a date, which helps when borders or jurisdictions changed over time.
Gramps stores names in Unicode, so entries can use any alphabet. Photos and other media stay as files on disk and are linked to the records they illustrate.
Sources, citations and evidence
Gramps separates a source, such as a parish register or a census, from a citation, which points to a specific page or entry in that source. Each citation stores a date and a confidence level from Very Low to Very High. This records the strength of a claim with the claim itself. Repository records note where a source is held, such as an archive or library.
You can mark records private, tag them for research tasks and add notes.
Navigating relatives and charts
The Relationships view centres on one person and shows their parents, spouses, siblings and children. You move through a family by clicking from one relative to the next. Chart views present the same data visually: a pedigree chart of ancestors, a fan chart of parents, a descendant fan, and a two-way fan showing ancestors and descendants together.
The Dashboard holds small panels called gramplets, such as surname clouds, age statistics, tree statistics, a to-do list and a What’s Next list of suggested research.
Maps and geography views
When the map component is installed, the Geography views plot places on a map. They can show every place connected to one person or one family. They can also track residences and moves for a person and their descendants with dates, or show all places in the tree. Two views compare the places visited by two people, or by two families, to judge whether they could have met.
Reports and books
Gramps reports turn the tree into documents. Text reports include ahnentafel and detailed ancestral reports, descendant reports, family group reports, complete individual reports, kinship and place reports. Graphical reports produce ancestor and descendant trees, fan charts, calendars, timelines, and bar or pie statistics charts. Graphviz-based reports draw relationship graphs, hourglass graphs and family-line graphs.
You can save text reports as HTML, PDF, ODT, LaTeX or RTF, and charts as PDF, PostScript or SVG. You can combine several reports into a book, with a title page, table of contents and alphabetical index. Report options control which people and details appear, and styles set fonts, colours and layout.
The Narrated Web Site report generates static HTML pages for a person or a set of people, ready to upload to a web host. Gramps itself has no web editing interface.
Filters and data tools
Filters select people or other records by criteria. You can combine them into more complex rules. They drive the list views, reports and exports. Gramps also includes a set of maintenance and analysis tools:
- Find Possible Duplicate People and Merge Citations to clean up repeated records
- Verify the Data, which checks the tree against tests the user sets
- Relationship Calculator, which names how two people are related
- Check and Repair Database and Remove Unused Objects for integrity problems
- Name tools that fix surname capitalization or split titles and prefixes out of names
- Media Manager for batch operations on media files
Import, export and backup
Gramps reads and writes GEDCOM, the common exchange format between genealogy programs, along with GeneWeb, CSV and vCard. It can also import Pro-Gen files and export Web Family Tree and vCalendar files. Its own Gramps XML format holds a complete tree, and a Gramps XML package bundles the tree with its media files. GEDCOM cannot hold everything Gramps stores, so Gramps XML is the format for full backups. An automatic backup option can save the tree on exit or on a timed schedule.
When exporting, Gramps can leave out records marked private and hide or replace the names of living people. It can also restrict output to the ancestors or descendants of one person and drop records not linked to the selected people.
Add-ons and extensions
Python plugins can add reports, tools and import or export formats. Third-party add-ons extend Gramps further, but the project does not officially maintain them.
